by Nghi Vo
“Oh how I do love you,” Daisy purred, sliding her fingers through his short hair before she kissed him. I had never seen her kiss anyone like that before. It was languid, entirely for her, and as pretty as it was, as much as I liked Gatsby’s shock at her aggression, I liked my own shock a little less. I was meant to be Daisy’s best friend, and I didn’t know this version of her. This version of her felt like a gun primed to fire.
“There’s a lady present,” I said from the couch, hoping she would knock it off before Tom came down on her like a thunder bolt, but she only looked over her shoulder at me, batting her eyes.
“Then you must kiss Nick as well, mustn’t you?”
“Vulgar,” I said, affecting both disinterest and disdain, and Nick squeezed my hand a little, mouthing thank you at me when Daisy returned to Gatsby’s mouth. He had a horror of performance and was typically at his best when he thought no one looked or cared.
I rolled my eyes at Nick to show him how very silly I found them both, and he rewarded me with a dim smile.
Daisy nearly toppled off of Gatsby’s thighs when there was a swift knock at the door. Tom never knocked, and after touching a clean piece of tissue paper to her eyes and her lips, she stood up and away.
“Come in,” she said.
To my surprise, it was Pammy and her nurse, and as Daisy cooed with delight in a language that she shared only with her daughter, I glanced at Gatsby.
He was frozen in place, quietly absorbed and fascinated, and a little horrified as well. I wondered with some cynicism where Pammy fit in with all of Daisy’s plans for Europe and the Mediterranean.
Oh God, what if she wants me to look after her?
The thought was sudden and sobering, unlikely, but not as unlikely as all that. Daisy might as easily ask an old school chum to look after her daughter as she would to take a cat she had adopted for a short while.
“Here’s my darling, my darling, my love and my life,” Daisy said, taking Pammy’s hand and encouraging her in a bashful pirouette.
Pammy’s eyes were full of Daisy, but when her mother pushed her towards us, she went easily enough. She called me Aunt Jordan and kissed me dutifully on the cheek, and she curtsied prettily for Nick and for Gatsby. Nick treated her with the grave courtesy that makes some adults so very popular with children, and Gatsby seemed oddly shy of her, darting glances between her small face and Daisy’s almost askance.
“Doesn’t she look an awful lot like me?” Daisy asked. “She’s all of me and none of Tom, isn’t that nice?”
She had the nurse take Pammy away again, the delicate child and the woman in white narrowly dodging Tom, who had reappeared with a tray of gin rickeys and a newly suspicious look. He handed me my drink without glancing at me, so I took the opportunity to look at him, taking in the clench of his jaw and the way his brows lowered like the horns of a bull considering a charge.
In the middle of Daisy saying something about the earth falling into the sun, he interrupted her.
“Say,” he said, looking at Gatsby, “why don’t you come out onto the veranda with me. Let me show you a thing.”
I couldn’t have been the only one who noticed the subtle darkening of Gatsby’s eyes, the way his shoulders came up like those of a young prizefighter. The genteel courtesy rippled and for a moment, I saw the willing brawler underneath.
“Why, of course, old sport. Nothing would please me better.”
The gin had gotten to me, I decided, freezing the inside of my head. For a moment, I was utterly sure that one of them would kill the other, and then we would be in some kind of wretched murder mystery, trying to decide how to cover up the crime and falling into paroxysms of paranoia as we offed each other one by one.
They rose almost in unison, and Nick rose a half-beat later, a serious look on his face, and followed them out.
They tromped out to the veranda like hunters going off into the marsh, and I took Daisy’s drink away from her, setting it on the table. She wasn’t drunk, she had barely started when my glass was already drained, but it was hard to remember that when she looked at me with such a fuzzy expression.
“Why hello, Jordan,” she said, and I resisted the urge to shake her.
“Daisy, you are going to get someone killed.”
“No, darling, not me,” she said. “We’ll be well away before anything happens.”
“You and me?”
She blinked.
“Me and Jay. You and Nick. It will be fine, I promise.”
She leaned to kiss me, I guessed, on the cheek, but instead she slipped or I did, because she was kissing me on the lips. We both tasted of gin and lime, and my lipstick was fainter, ghostly on her mouth. The kiss sent a shock through me because it didn’t seem to shock her at all. She winked at me, pressing her thumb against my lower lip as if to wipe the kiss away.
“Shh, it’ll be fine.”
The maids hung the dining room with swathes of dark blue silk, barricading us from the sun as the infrequent gusts of wind billowed the makeshift curtains like sails. Lunch was a plate of cold meat and more gin, and we picked at the platter in a depressed way. Nick had given me a significant glance upon coming back in with Gatsby and Tom; I would have to get that story out of him later.
The talk wound back and forth like a dazed mouse caught in a box trap; if I had to hear Tom talk about turning a garage into a stable one more time, I might save Gatsby the trouble and simply stab him myself.
Daisy, seated between Tom and Gatsby, seemed to turn thinner and tighter, and when she jumped up, it was like a steel guitar string had been plucked too hard.
“Well, what in the world are we going to do with ourselves this afternoon?” she cried. “What are we going to do with ourselves tomorrow, and then for the next thirty years?”
“You’re being morbid,” I said, because I mistrusted that look in her eye. “We don’t have to do anything. We can just wait for fall. Life starts over again in fall.”
Daisy shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. It made me think of the night she wanted to see a lion. They were real tears at the moment. They were real tears in the moment.
“But it’s so hot,” Daisy said. “I can’t take much more of this. Let’s all go to town!”
Nick and I stared at her, too stunned by the heat and the awkwardness to do much more than watch her politely. While Gatsby probably would have liked nothing better than to make it snow for her, Tom was monopolizing him with talk of horses that Gatsby obviously didn’t have and didn’t care about.
“Who wants to go to town?” Daisy said, raising her voice insistently, and when Gatsby looked up at her, she stopped.
I had always thought that Daisy was like the rest of us Louisville girls, liars every one for the right cause, though of course you would never convince any of us of what one right cause that should be. Now I could see that she was no kind of liar at all, as her hand came out to touch Gatsby’s face right in front of her husband.
“Oh,” she said in faltering tones. “Oh but you look so cool…”
At the last moment, she pulled back. That feeling of disaster that had hung over us all day finally disappeared, because the disaster had come.
And Gatsby, who turned out to be nothing more than the son of a dirt farmer and his half-Chippewa wife, who had constructed a palace so profoundly beautiful that we need never look for the truth, simply forgot to lie with any part of his body in that moment. In that moment, they were alone together in the dining room, in the mansion, in the state, in the country, in the world, and the rest of us were left to beat our fists on the wall outside.
“You always look so cool,” she said, and then the spell was broken.
“All right, then,” Tom said, pushing away from the table. “Let’s go to town. That’s what you want, right, Daisy?”
Gatsby’s eyes narrowed at Tom’s tone, but Daisy turned conciliatory, looping her hand through Tom’s arm.
“Oh but we’ve not even had cigarettes yet, surely we shou
ld let everyone—”
“You’ve all been smoking through lunch,” said Tom the athlete. “Let’s go.”
I dragged Daisy up to her bedroom (“Oh, just a little touch-up and hats, of course!”), and I soaked a cold cloth for her in the bathroom. She took it, dabbing at her eyes and her red face.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said vaguely, more doubtful than she had been before.
“I don’t know either,” I said, “but Daisy, make a decision. You can’t have them both, you know. You can’t live in East Egg for Tom and your parents, and row across the Sound to Gatsby’s as soon as the sun sets.”
“But of course I can,” she said as if scandalized. “You just don’t know, Jordan. It’s not just double lives. It’s triple, quads and quints…”
She wasn’t drunk. That was the horror of it.
I was tempted to make our excuses, but then she dropped the clammy cloth on the floor and rushed past me, dragging down her boxes of clothes and hats from her closet. Coats and capes scattered over the floor, and she handed me one round little metallic gold cap while taking the other for herself.
“Come on,” she said. There was a heat to her that put the day to shame, as if she were burning up with fever from within. “Oh Jordan, come on!”
Nick, Tom, and Gatsby waited for us patiently in the drive, Tom being tiresome about the cars, Gatsby running out of patience, and Nick looking subtly panicked. I wanted to tell him it was just people behaving badly, that what would be cause for years and years of stiff necks and pointed spurns in St. Paul would likely be forgotten in a season. Tom was still going on; for some reason, he wanted to drive Gatsby’s car to town.
“Well, you take my coupe and let me drive your car.”
“I don’t think there’s much gas,” Gatsby said, and Tom’s face grew hard even as he smiled.
“Plenty of gas,” said Tom. “And if it runs out I can stop at a drugstore. You can buy anything at a drugstore nowadays, can’t you?”
There was an uncomfortable shuffling silence. I fingered the gold cap in my hand, wondering if it would be better for all concerned if I faked a fainting spell and had to be carried inside. Disasters had been averted with less.
“Well, golly, that’s fine,” Daisy said with a laugh that was almost natural. “Jay and I can take Tom’s coupe, and Tom, you, Nick, and Jordan, meet us in the city. That will be fine.”
Everything that happened afterward wasn’t worth it to see the look on Tom’s face, but everything that had happened up until that point definitely was. His jaw dropped, he turned even redder, and if he had had a cigar, I was sure he would have bitten it right in half.
Before he was quite over it Gatsby helped Daisy into the coupe, dashing as a cavalier earning his lady’s favor, and she glanced back at us as they roared off, giving me and Nick a wink and a jaunty wave.
Then of course Tom had no choice but to pile Nick and me into Gatsby’s cream-colored Rolls, Nick next to him and me stretched out in the back, and set off for the city eating their dust.
It’s all very well for Daisy, I thought with irritation. She got to drive in with Gatsby. Nick and I were stuck with Tom’s growling that swung between righteous fury and a self-pitying whine. I tuned it out until we got to Willets Point in Queens, the ash yard. It was entirely uninteresting, of course, except for the Wilson Gas Station that I knew from Nick driving me back and forth.
“Say, shouldn’t we stop for gas?” I asked, sitting up.
“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” Tom said dismissively.
“Oh stop, for goodness’ sake,” I exclaimed. “I’m not going to walk in this heat if you run out.”
Tom groaned, but pulled over. As Nick helped me out, Tom engaged in a surprisingly spirited banter with the crabbed owner, Wilson himself. The man had always pointedly ignored me when I showed up with Nick, so I did him the same favor now, looking around at the tall piles of ash pushed up against the high wooden fences. There was no wind to blow the ash around, but the ash heaps loomed ominously, threatening to bury us all if we so much as took a step out of place.
There was a small store inside the gas station, but no one to mind the till. I picked up a pack of violet-flavored gum, leaving a penny on the counter, and I came back out popping it loudly. Wilson had finally got the gas going, and he was exclaiming to Tom about money woes and infidelity while Tom only grew more and more red.
“Like they have anything in common besides having two legs, two arms, and barely a brain between them,” I scoffed to Nick, who still looked slightly sick.
“Oh poor darling,” I murmured. “This is going to be an absolute disaster. What do you say we have a few drinks and then vanish to my place? We can get just as drunk and be just as sweaty on Park Avenue as we can wherever Gatsby and Daisy want to go.”
Nick shook his head.
“No, I want to stay. I want you to stay too.”
“Fine, fine,” I sighed. “I do spoil you.”
He smiled a little at that, and by then Tom, shaking over some slight or another, was wrapping things up with the odious Wilson. Wilson gave me a perfunctory look of dislike as Nick handed me back into the car.
As I climbed in, I happened to catch a glimpse of a red-haired woman at the window above the shop. I only saw her for a moment before Nick shut the door, but she was furious, anger making two deep and abyssal holes out of her eyes, her lips peeled back over teeth that were shockingly white. She looked half-mad, and it shook me for a moment as we drove off.
We passed under the eyes of the same hideous billboard advertising some defunct optometrist’s office, a pair of eyes that gazed at us with avuncular malice as we left the ashes behind. I always felt an obscure kind of relief when Nick and I passed under its gaze, as if we had escaped some kind of calamity or other in Queens, and I was happy to leave the gas station and the madwoman in the attic behind us.
Tom grew insufferable as we got closer to Astoria, alternately speeding and tapping on the brakes to curse the speed of the other drivers around us. He almost ran us off the road coming up too fast on a corner, and even Nick barked at him to keep him from hitting a pair of veiled women dressed in black. The women shook their fists at us as we sped by, and I shrugged and waved as we passed.
We came up around Perry Street to find the blue coupe snug on the shoulder, and Daisy stood up to wave us over.
“Oh there you are,” she laughed, her cheeks flushed and her hair a mess after the ride with the top down. “We were afraid we’d lost you.”
“Fat chance,” Tom said shortly. “We’re in the city like you wanted, Daisy, what do you want to do now?”
“Let’s take in a movie,” I suggested. “The theaters are always cool and quiet.”
And we wouldn’t have to talk, and maybe that would mean we would survive the afternoon without someone getting a fat lip or a black eye. At this point, I couldn’t even figure out who was going to be the most likely victim.
Daisy shook her head, patting down her dark hair with birdlike flutters of her hands. She was pretty, if common, like this, and Gatsby almost reached up to smooth her hair back before he remembered himself.
“No, no, you go to the theater,” she said. “Jay and I will ride around and meet you afterward. You’ll find us on the street corners like buskers or streetwalkers, so very shameful…”
“Absolutely not,” I said to forestall Tom’s explosion. I was wondering if she was hoping to provoke him into one, but if so, she should have told the rest of us so that we could be good witnesses or, better yet, have stayed home. “No, come on. The city’s empty, and it’s all ours, let’s not waste it…”
A truck honked at us in strident offense as it narrowly missed Gatsby’s cream monstrosity coming around a corner. Tom looked as if the insult was personal.
“Well, we can’t stay here. Follow us over to the Plaza, at least we can talk above the muck and the noise there…”
It was one of those untidy and inelegant affair
s, where everyone has some vague idea of what to do, but no real ability to force the issue, and half the people have secret opinions and the other half, in this case, Nick and Gatsby, were too easily swayed by one person or the other to decide.
We ended up at the Plaza where Daisy’s idea of renting five rooms for the five bathtubs actually seemed enticing for a bit, and then we ended up renting one of the grand suites on the seventeenth floor.
I never liked the Plaza all that much, though many of the people I ran about with did. The staff was always a little too stiff about me, a little too curious about who I was there to see, though of course the garden was charming and more at ease. Today at least, the man behind the desk was giving us all a certain look as we rolled in and demanded a place, as Daisy put it, to cool down and to make love. I wasn’t sure if it was Tom’s frigid Puritan looks or Gatsby’s wink that got us through, but the elevator attendant was nothing but cordial as we tumbled in and tumbled out, tipping him extravagantly.
The suite’s sitting room was broad and tall, but even when we threw open every window, we couldn’t cool it down.
“We should send for an ax,” Daisy said so decisively that I thought she might actually do it. “Bam, bam, two more windows in just like that, and it might cool down in here, God…”
Unbidden, I remembered her in her slip in the garden on a night almost as hot as this one. I remembered a shovel in her hands, and I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about that right now.
“No, send for ice instead, then we can make up some drinks,” I offered from the low divan by the window. I shamelessly took it up all on my own, leaving Nick to sit on the ground beside me, occasionally reaching for my hand to kiss it. His eyes kept darting between Gatsby and Tom, as if waiting for a fistfight to break out. I would have said it was too hot for such nonsense, but I had seen stupider things.
“Drinks,” Daisy said dreamily, drifting to the mirror to fix her flat hair. “Drinks would make this ever so much more bearable. The mint juleps were the only thing that helped at my wedding, Jordan, don’t you remember? Why, a June wedding in Louisville…”